After nearly three decades of remaining silent about it, Cheryl McDonald started telling the painful story of her sister Carleen’s disappearance and death — first at a vigil, then at gatherings and to the media.

As the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls opened its Montreal hearings Monday, McDonald knew it was important to tell it once more. While doing so, she shared a picture she hadn’t before.

In the photo, taken a few years ago on a hot summer day, McDonald is lying on the ground in her backyard, the cool grass almost taking over her face.

She recalled lying there and thinking: “Why did Carleen, 25, sneak out in the middle of the night on Sept. 4, 1988? Why was her body found by a deer hunter seven weeks later in the forest?

“Why did she leave us all, leave her children?” McDonald, a Mohawk woman from Akwesasne, asked during her testimony. “Why did she leave my parents?”

McDonald described her sister as a “rambunctious little spirit,” a defiant child who wasn’t afraid to roughhouse. A tomboy, she would cut the hair off McDonald’s dolls. Later, she would try to spike her hair like Rod Stewart. At 16, she fell in love and was pregnant. A tumultuous and abusive relationship followed.

For 27 years of “constant churning” in her mind, McDonald had gone back and forth on what she thinks happened to Carleen, shifting between her death being a suicide and thinking someone took her out to the woods.

Eventually, she settled on the former, and she understood that summer day she needed to start focusing on her own healing in order to find peace.

Testifying at the inquiry, she said Monday, is part of that ongoing process. Already with three grandchildren and expecting a fourth this summer, she said she believes “a lot can change for the good” over several generations.

“And I really believe one day all of this will be worth it,” she said, of speaking up about Carleen. “No one person can change this. It’s us standing together as men and women (that will).”

But though McDonald says she has found peace, questions linger. They intensify every time she hears another family’s painful story of Indigenous women and girls reported missing or found murdered.

Did the police do enough? When the family was finally brought to where Carleen’s body was found, McDonald said, parts of her remains were still there on a blanket beneath the trees. McDonald watched a family member dig a hole and use a pitchfork to pick up the blanket and bury it.

“They left the crime scene like that,” she said through tears, shaking her head. “It still haunts me.”

The national inquiry was launched in September 2016. More than 70 people are expected to testify at this week’s hearings in Montreal.

After McDonald’s testimony Monday, members of the Blackned family were sworn in.

Rose-Ann Blackned, a Cree woman who lived in Val-d’Or, was 24 when she was found beaten and frozen to death on Nov. 16, 1991. A mother of two, she had been reported missing nine days before.

Her son Silas, 5 at the time, said he has few memories of his mother. But he remembers her making him wear a full suit for church, even if he was the only kid to do so.

He remembers breaking her cigarettes around the house because he didn’t want her smoking. And mostly, how he kept thinking of her after she died, wanting to show her when he received good grades or caught a big fish.

The inquiry gives the family hope, Silas said, but he wonders what comes next.

In 2017, provincial police announced they were reopening the investigation into Blackned’s death, but only a few months later, the Crown prosecutor’s office informed the family there wasn’t enough evidence to lay charges.

“They told us there’s nothing more we can do as a family. Do you know how much that hurts?” asked her sister, Mary-Ann Blackned, through heavy tears.

Hunched over in her seat during difficult testimony, Mary-Ann said she has lost faith in the police and the justice system, but hasn’t lost hope that she’ll one day get the closure she seeks.

“That’s all I ever wanted for my sister, justice,” she said. “And every woman that went missing and murdered, they all deserve justice, too. So that the families can have peace.”

Before the hearings began Monday, commissioner Michèle Audette had reminded people of how painful some of the families’ testimony will be.

“For most of them, it’s going to be the first time that they share their truth,” Audette said.

In the conference room, tissue boxes bookended each row of seats, accompanied by brown paper bags. People were encouraged to place their tear-soaked tissues in them — they’ll be collected at the end of the week, kept safe, and burned and prayed for in a sacred fire this spring.

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